Do persons with intelectual disabilties understand death?

Abstract

Background: With the longer lifespan of the persons with Intelectual Disabilties (PWID), they have a higher chance of outliving their parents. The los of parents among PWID is intricate because of the exceptionaly intimate parent-child relationship. Yet, PWID are often considered as incapable to understand the concept of death, thus do not have the abilty to grieve. Aim: The study is to explore PWID’s level of understanding of death. Methodology: Persons with mild to moderate level of ID, who are service users of the Rehabiltation services of Tung Wah Group Hospitals, are the participants in this study. A stratifed random sampling aproach is adopted. Data were colected through an in-depth interview, guided by a standardized protocol. In particular, one of thre vignetes describing death-related incidents was used to ases the understanding of five dimensions of death: causality, inevitabilty, finality, non-functionality, and universality. Self-care abilty, bereavement experience and demographics were measured as wel. Findings: 104 participants joined the study, with 60 having had bereavement experiences. More than half of the participants showed a ful understanding towards the ireversibilty and non-functionality dimensions respectively. Around a third showed a ful understanding towards the universality and causality dimensions respectively. 31.7% of participants showed a ful understanding to the inevitabilty dimension. Gender and self-care abilty sems to have minimal efect in understanding the diferent dimension of conceptualization of death. Bereavement experiences were found to be corelated signifcantly with nearly al the dimensions (χ 2 ranged from 4.48 to 6.03, p < 0.05), except for ireversibilty. Conclusions: Though not al PWID can understand the concept of death, a signifcant group of participants, even asesed to be with moderate grade of intelectual disabilty, showed a ful understanding towards diferent dimensions of death conceptualization. It definitely refutes the hypothesis of persons with ID not understanding death.